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<div class="left-header">
<h2>The project smartmontools</h2>
<ul class="High">
    <li><a href="#history">History</a> of smartmontools</li>
    <li>The <a href="#team">smartmontools team</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<h3><a name="history"></a>History of smartmontools</h3>

<p>Smartmontools was derived directly from smartsuite. 
The smartsuite code was originally developed as a Senior Thesis by
Michael Cornwell at the Concurrent Systems Laboratory (now part of the
<a href="http://ssrc.soe.ucsc.edu/"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Storage Systems Research
Center</a>), Jack Baskin School of Engineering, University of
California, Santa Cruz.
You can find some information about the original smartsuite project here:
<a href="http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/archive/99-00/09-99/smart_software.htm"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Press Release 1</a>, 
<a href="http://www.santa-cruz.com/archive/1999/September/22/local/stories/5local.htm"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Press Release 2</a>, 
<a href="http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/99-00/09-27/smart.html"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Press Release 3</a>.
</p>

<p>According to <a href="http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />SSRC</a>
smartsuite is no longer maintained; the last release was in 2001.</p>

<p>Smartmontools was first released in October 2002. It differs from smartsuite 
in that it supports the ATA/ATAPI-5 standard. So for example <tt>smartctl</tt> from smartsuite 
has no facility for printing the SMART self-test logs, and doesn't print timestamp
information in the most usable way. The <tt>smartctl</tt> utility
in smartmontools has added functionality for this (<tt>-q, -l selftest,-S,
-T, -v and -m</tt> options), updated documentation, and also fixes small
technical bugs in smartsuite. [One example: smartsuite does not actually use the
ATA SMART RETURN STATUS command to find out the health status of a disk.  It instead tries to infer this from the
SMART Attribute values.] See the 
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/browser/trunk/smartmontools/CHANGELOG">CHANGELOG</a>
file in our repository for a summary of what's been done.</p> 

<p>The <tt>smartd</tt> utility differs from the smartsuite <tt>smartd</tt> in major ways.
First, it prints somewhat more informative error messages to the syslog.
Second, on startup it looks for a configuration file
<tt>/etc/smartd.conf</tt>, and if <tt>smartd</tt> finds this file, it
monitors the list of devices therein, rather than querying all IDE and
SCSI devices on your system. (If the configuration file does not
exist, then it does query all IDE and SCSI devices.) Also, it's
a well-behaved daemon and doesn't leave open file descriptors and other
detrius behind. In addition, the <tt>smartmontools</tt> version of
<tt>smartd</tt> can be instructed (via Directives in the configuration
file) to monitor for changes in a number of different disk properties:
the SMART status, failure or prefailure attributes going below
threshold, new errors appearing in the ATA Error Log or the SMART
Self-Test Log, and so on. <tt>smartd</tt> can also send an email warning or run a
user-specified executable if it detects a problem with the disk.
</p>

<p>The other principle difference is that smartmontools is an
OpenSource development project, meaning that we keep the files in SVN,
and that other developers who wish to contribute can commit changes to
the repository. If you would like to contribute, please write to to <a
href="http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/smartmontools-support"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />smartmontools-support</a>.</p>

<p>But the bottom line is that the code in smartmontools is derived
directly from smartsuite and is similar. The smartsuite package
can be found <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartsuite/"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />here</a>.</p>


<h3><a name="team"></a>The developers and supporters of smartmontools</h3>

<ul class="High">
    <li><strong>Bruce Allen (Initiator and Project Leader)</strong></li>
</ul>

<div class="left-header"><img src="pics/BruceAndCat_2008_04_22-sm.jpg" width="200" height="150" vspace="10" align="top" alt="Bruce Allen" /></div>
<div><p>I am a professor of physics at the U. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and a Director of the Albert Einstein
Institute in Hannover, which is operated by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Leibniz University Hannover.
</p>
<p>I got interested in SMART because of my research work.  I work on data analysis
for gravitational waves (the LIGO, GEO and VIRGO detectors) and my research groups build and operate
large computer clusters
for this purpose.
My research group at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover operates a cluster with
2400 disks (the Atlas Cluster) and 1100 TB of storage. My research group at U. Wisconsin - Milwaukee runs a <a
href="http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/beowulf/nemo/">
<img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />beowulf
cluster</a> with 1200 (SATA-II) distributed disks attached to hardware RAID controllers.  
We have more than 300 TB disk space on that system. 
It's nice to have advanced warning when a disk is going to fail.</p>
<p>Smartmontools is the only open-source software project that I manage. When smartmontools first started in 2002,
I did most of the coding and real work.  I was lucky to quickly find several other developers like Doug Gilbert and
Christian Franke who
knew much more than I did!  These days I mostly do coordination and cheerleading - 
in any given technical area there are typically other developers who know more than I do.
</p>
<p>
I also do
some work on BOINC, and run the Einstein@Home distributed search for gravitational waves.</p>
</div>

<ul class="High">
    <li><strong>Christian Franke (Developer and Maintainer)</strong></li>
</ul>
<div class="right-header"><img src="pics/chrfranke.jpg" width="120" height="150" vspace="10" align="top" alt="Christian Franke" /></div>
<div><p>My interest in hard disk monitoring actually starts when the disk of the christmas-gift-PC for
my son failed in the evening of Dec. 23, 2003. This resulted in a first Windows port of smartctl checked
in on Feb. 23, 2004. Future plan for smartmontools is a major redesign of smartd and the internal device
interface, which benefits from the transition from C to C++.</p>
<p>My other open source contributions include some small patches for Cygwin and Mozilla.org
(Firefox/Thunderbird/SeaMonkey and Bugzilla) codebase, a Windows port of hdparm, and a recent Cygwin port
of GRUB2.</p>
<p>In real life, I hold a degree in computer science and work for a company developing applications for
banking &amp; finance.</p>
<br /></div>

<ul class="High">
    <li><strong>Guido Guenther (Developer and Maintainer)</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Guido has a sharp eye for distribution issues and clean system architecture.
He improves Makefiles, configuration and installation scripts, cares for packaging
issues and makes sure that <tt>Return Values</tt> are correct. 
Last not least, he added CCISS (Compaq Smart Array Controller) support with 
contributions from Praveen Chidambaram, Douglas Gilbert and Frederic Boiteux.</p>

<ul class="High">
    <li><strong>Gabriele Pohl (Website Maintainer)</strong></li>
</ul>

<div class="left-header-yellow"><img src="pics/gap-woody.jpg" width="200" height="178" alt="Gabriele Pohl" vspace="10"/></div>

<div><p>Once upon a time I got an alarming BIOS message whilst booting my computer:</p>
 
<div class="code">SMART Failure Predicted on Primary Master:<br /> 
Warning! Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A Failure may be imminent..</div>

<p>I was very curious, what it could be, that claimed to know, what's up with my harddisk. 
I started an investigation about the predicted disk error and SMART in general,
which leads me straightly to smartmontools. I use it for 4 years now and wrote two 
<a href="http://www.dipohl.de/publikationen/anleitung-zu-smartmontools.html">articles</a> (German), 
to spread good news about it. To help both, the project and the users, I reorganized the smartmontools 
website a bit. I hope you'll like it.</p> 

<p>We have a main menu with seven sections, an integrated search engine and a new layout. 
Next step will be, to update the websites content, so that it reflects the state of the 
current version <tt>5.3.8</tt>. Conributions are welcome!
Mail to <a href="mailto:smartmontools-support@lists.sourceforge.net">smartmontools-support</a> 
list, if you have questions or want to add information.</p>
<br /></div>

<ul class="High">
    <li><strong>Erwan Velu (Packager and Maintainer)</strong></li>
</ul>
<div class="right-header"><img src="pics/erwan.jpg" width="120" height="180" vspace="10" align="top" alt="Erwan Velu" /></div>
<div><p>My interest in SMART arose at my previous job at Mandriva. I was
building up a Linux distribution to turn a set of computers into a super computer (HPC).
While looking at how we can manage such a cluster, I was faced with some failing disks. 
Doing a short research on that problem, I found this project.</p>

<p>As I am also packaging applications in RPM for Mandriva Linux, I decided
to include smartmontools in it. My role is to keep smartmontools
up-to-date in the Linux distribution and reporting bugs to the
developers. To be honest, this happens once in a blue moon.</p>

<p>Since I am implicated in the smartmontools project, friends often ask me for
help in understanding how theirs disks feels ;o). So I also wrote an 
<a href="http://www.lea-linux.org/documentations/index.php/Hardware-hard_plus-smart">
<img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />article 
about smartmontools</a> in French language.</p>
<br /></div>

<ul class="High">
    <li><strong>Other portraits</strong></li>
</ul>
<p> will follow..</p>

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